


my blood's still flowing and my heart's still

by electrahearts



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/F, From Sex to Love, Polyamory, Sexual References, Threesome - F/F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1174421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrahearts/pseuds/electrahearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t expect for there to be more than sex with Erica, but she starts coming over less to have Lydia’s head between her thighs, and more to steal her shoes and kiss her good morning. Maybe she should regret getting involved with her, because she's human and Lydia and Allison are so very far from it, but she really, really doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my blood's still flowing and my heart's still

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rvst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rvst/gifts).



> written for the lovely [kenfaidar](http://www.kenfaidar.tumblr.com)
> 
> this was taken rather more literally than intended but i hope you enjoy it anyway, cutie!!!

The humans like to think of the gods as dictators, rulers, the chess masters of a board that only they can see, rearranging lives and deaths on a whim, because they want to, because why not?

She wishes it were that easy, that she didn’t care so much.

She can see their petty jealousies, their fears; sense their joy bursting from their skin like pure sunlight when they thank her for favours that she has never done them. She spends more time than she should wondering at the frailty of them, watching blood bubble under their skins. She wonders what a heartbeat feels like.

Sometimes, when Allison lies down beside her and they curl together like she’s seen humans do, she lets her hand linger on her lover’s chest and imagines she can feel Allison’s heartbeat pick up at her touch.

It’s a foolish dream, but one she clings to as the earth changes beneath her and the heavens stay the same, as she stays the same. Cities grow up beneath her feet like neglected children, sprawling and loud and begging for attention, and Allison pulls her deeper and deeper into the woods they’ve always known, her bow in one hand and Lydia’s fingers curved around the other.

The humans like to think of the gods as strong and wilful and above all, unchanging, and sometimes Lydia despairs at those she breathed life into being right.

* * *

The thing about being an all powerful goddess who has lived for millennia is that she’s seen it all, the sweeping valleys and crashing oceans, has felt the breeze in her hair and watched the humans go about their daily lives until she knows things she’ll never need, like how to preserve meat or scrub blood off clothing or what it means when your husband brings you flowers when he never, ever does.

To be honest, it gets boring.

Allison always tells her that she’s just got to _find_ something, but it’s different for her – the hunter gods come and go as they please, walk beneath the moonlight with bows in their hands and strength in their limbs. She has something to do other than to watch the humans and grant them tiny favours, only the ones that don’t interfere too much. They’ve learned their lesson from the last time they cupped the world in their hands and reshaped it as they pleased, and Lydia understands that there’s rules now – but she still hates it.

The hunter gods come and go with the wolves at their sides and blood on their hands, teaching the humans without them even knowing, luring good meat into their paths so the hungriest villages don’t starve. It’s all they can do, and it isn’t much, but it’s _something_. Lydia, on the other hand, has to wait.

It’s not like she doesn’t like waiting, sometimes. Allison’s lips taste sweeter when they’ve been apart too long and Lydia has watched the humans fuck in the villages below, all lips and teeth and sweet, and sometimes Lydia kisses the goddess in her arms and wonders how she would taste with salt water beading on her skin.

Sometimes, though, her lips are dry and her kisses perfunctory and Allison looks helpless like she rarely does. She says goodbye with her brow furrowed and her lips pursed, and they may not need to sleep but she wishes they did, just so she wouldn’t have to sense Allison’s frustration at her inability to know what’s wrong or how to fix it. Allison always wants to do the right thing, and Lydia can feel her skin hum in discontent at not being able to.

* * *

Allison loses herself in the woods sometimes, comes out strong and determined with a fierce light in her eyes, and Lydia kisses her and doesn’t ever want to stop.

Allison whispers the hunters’ plans into her skin, tells her about a new kind of prey, because the woods are almost lost to them, stolen from beneath their noses by wilful children needing to stretch their greedy arms further, but she cannot give up the hunt. She tells her about the humans, how real they are, how desperate they are, about flesh and blood children hiding under bridges and women selling their bodies in order to feed them so they can sell again. She tells her about protection, and Lydia thinks she understands.

“You want to leave,” she says. Allison nods. She does not look uncertain, like she’s been thinking about this for so long that it is now an eventuality, not a possibility. Lydia wonders how she could have missed it.

“We aren’t supposed to interfere, you know,” she points out.

“This isn’t interfering. This is... helping,” Allison says, flashes her dimpled smile and her bright eyes, and Lydia doesn’t know why she’s even bothering to pretend to fight this.

“I’ll help too,” she declares, and doesn’t let her voice tremble with the thoughts hiding underneath her skin. She has always wanted something different, something new, and she doesn’t know how to feel now that she might get it.

Allison kisses her, and Lydia thinks that maybe this is exactly what she expected would happen. She kind of doesn’t mind.

* * *

Their apartment is small and covered in cat fur, stains on the walls from the previous tenants, and she doesn’t know where Allison got any of the currency she’s seen the humans use, but clearly it wasn’t enough to get a proper bathroom.

She’s a _goddess_ , she at least deserves a bathtub.

She’s contemplating whether it would be too obvious if she shifted reality, just a bit, so there’s enough space to put a bath, when Allison brings Erica home.

“And you are?” she asks, looks the blonde human standing in her hallway up and down with her eyebrows raised. She doesn’t really want to admit that she gets a thrill when the girl just smirks.

“Lydia,” Allison says, slight warning in her tone. The girl laughs.

“It’s okay. Not everyone takes kindly to competition,” she says baldly, her eyes scorching Allison’s figure when she glances her way.

“I’m Erica. Allison teaches my self defence class. She’s very good,” she adds, and if it’s intended to be an afterthought then it’s the most deliberate one Lydia has ever heard. She supposes she should be glad that Allison's class went well enough to bring one of her students home with her, that maybe Allison will start feeling like she's doing something to help like she wanted to.

“Yes, she is,” she mutters almost absently, and Allison smiles wickedly. Erica's gaze darts between them, and if Lydia had expected her to back down – _competition_ , really? – then she’s proven incredibly wrong when Erica smiles too, looking delighted.

“I thought so,” she says, cocky and confident and golden, and Lydia didn’t expect to want to sleep with a human so soon but she wants to taste the sweat on Erica’s skin and watch her fall apart in that utterly unselfconscious way that only humans can seem to manage. Allison takes her hand and digs her nails into flesh, and it seems that decision has been made for her and for once she doesn’t mind.

(She doesn’t expect for there to be more than sex with Erica, but she starts coming over less to have Lydia’s head between her thighs and more to steal her shoes and kiss her good morning. Maybe she should regret getting involved with her, because she's human and Lydia and Allison are so very far from it, but she really, really doesn’t.)

* * *

It’s hard, at first, fitting another person into the lives they’re just beginning to carve out, because Lydia and Allison have smoothed each other’s edges into sea glass by trying to fit them together, and Erica... Erica is _all_ pointed edges, every blade biting and sharp like her heels and her humour.

She can see the shell of another girl under Erica’s skin in the way she chews on her lip when she thinks she’s done something wrong, when Allison gets caught up planning her next class and forgets to respond to Erica straight away, in the hesitance she refuses to show when she asks or tells or shows them something, like she thinks they’re going to turn away if she sets a foot wrong.

Allison’s best with her when she falters, kisses her until she forgets or writes the reasons they like her on her skin with her nails, and she sees them watching the marks flare red and fade too swiftly. Erica heals very quickly, for a human.

Sometimes, Lydia studies them like she studies everything else, catalogues the way Allison smiles differently at Erica than at her, how Erica’s hands always settle on Allison’s waist when they kiss, how they share space easily, a give and take that Lydia has only had with Allison. She watches how they learn to communicate better, how they pass each other mugs and packets of instant coffee (or in Erica’s case, tea) in the mornings before either of them are able to use words properly, though Allison is slightly better than Erica.

For all her sweetness, though, Allison has a razor-sharp knife for a spine and claws for words, and when they fight it goes on for days, the impossible meeting the unstoppable, and Lydia’s never as glad as she is when they lock her out of the bedroom and emerge hours later, barely clothed and hair like tangled vines.

She does wish she got to see them make up, but letting them stage a dramatic reproduction for her later is almost as good.

(“For fun,” Erica says, and her smile shows all her teeth.)

* * *

She takes them to the theatre because she wants to, and it’s her turn to choose; it’s different to how she’d imagined it would be. She’d underestimated the intensity, how the words would sink their hooks in and drag her into emotions she can put a name to but doesn’t know how to describe. She’s seen this play before, had watched the faces and the actions and the intentions change from year to year to year, but when Oedipus looks into the spotlight with his eyes filled with blood, she breathes a sigh of relief like she never has before.

(She knows that living like this, living with _humans_ , is changing her, but she doesn’t know whether or not she cares yet.)

Allison and Erica make out in the seats next to her like they’re completely uninterested, even though Lydia knows full well that she used to read _Oedipus Rex_ in the hospital after her seizures. It’s part of why Lydia had chosen this particular play, because she can’t do anything about the fact that Erica shakes and shudders in decidedly unpleasant ways, but maybe she can give her this. It will have to be enough, for now, until she can tell Erica everything and ask for her permission to shift things around just enough to make it better.

If she can find a way to phrase ‘Allison and I are actually goddesses’ in a way that won’t get her dumped, or a cell in a psychiatric ward.

* * *

Their second Christmas with the humans is better than the first, because this time Lydia’s less offended at them celebrating a god’s offspring rather than actual gods (and more importantly, goddesses), and this time Erica is there, stringing garlands and humming carols and changing the doorbell to the worst version of Jingle Bells that Lydia has ever heard.

Erica hands each of them a brightly coloured present, the paper slightly crumpled and the folds showing clearly, and she has to smile at how much effort Erica puts in, even when she pretends not to. She feels content, with Allison’s arm around her waist and Erica looking at her expectantly, and she’s thinking much more charitable thoughts than she was last year when she manages to undo the paper.

“You bought me a strap-on,” she says bluntly. She shouldn’t be surprised, really.

“I bought _us_ a strap-on,” Erica corrects, smiles sharp and predatory, her lips stretched in a smear of bright red that Lydia intends on kissing off. Later.

“Erica,” Allison says, her voice low, “You bought me the same one.”

“Yes.” Erica smiles again, even more brilliantly than before, and Lydia wonders how she didn’t think of it first. And then Allison’s kissing her and Erica’s hands are making their way up her body and then she stops thinking about anything at all.

* * *

Technically, there are two residents of their one bedroom apartment, but Erica’s there more often than she isn’t, reading scraps of Lydia’s newest scientific paper and letting Allison practice self defence on her and leaving lipstick marks on the rims of the wineglasses Lydia has coveted since before they left the heavens. They’re impossible to get off, and there’s more than one argument about whether or not Erica should be the one to scrub them completely clean, no matter how long it takes, before Allison rolls her eyes and tells them to stop raising their eyebrows at each other from across the room like it solves anything.

(Erica breaks eye contact to tell Allison why she’s wrong, and Lydia wins.)

They’re lying on the only bed they own, which is a tight squeeze for the three of them but Allison makes up for it by sleeping practically on top of Erica anyway, when Erica’s fingers still in her hair. Lydia hears her breathing deepen, like she’s steeling herself, like she wants to say something she’s been thinking about for a while but doesn’t know how it’ll be received. She hopes it’s another sex thing, because despite all the research Lydia does in her attempts to best her, Erica always does come up with the best ideas. It might be something about her being human, but Lydia suspects it’s just Erica.

“You don’t have a heartbeat,” Erica says. Lydia can feel her body stiffening, and if her heart was flesh and blood, it would be sinking. She had forgotten. She had gotten slack and screwed it up because she felt safe, because for the first time in millennia she had felt like she was home. “Neither of you do.”

“Yes, well-” she starts, with no idea what she’s going to say, but Erica cuts her off with a sharp look.

“Tell me the _truth_ ,” she says, scared and stubborn and just a little bit fragile, and Lydia shatters, and tells her everything.

She forces herself to look Erica in the eye the entire time, forces herself not to wish Allison was here, because she isn’t and Lydia can do this alone if she has to. And she does have to, because she’s in love with a human despite not being one herself, and it’s not something these modern humans, with their technology and their blasphemy and their fantasies that stay fantasies, are conditioned to believe.

“Lydia, you can literally change the fabric of the universe, I can’t-“ Erica breaks off, stops pacing the floor like she’s been doing for the last half hour, but it’s not much of an improvement in Lydia’s eyes because she starts looking towards the door like it holds the answers.

“Well, that’s a bit dramatic,” she says, twists her lips in what she hopes is a wry smile. It’s been a while since she’s felt so out of her depth, but sometimes humans make expressions even she can’t decipher and duplicate, even after studying them for years and years on end.

“I need some time,” Erica says, and walks out without another word. No matter how long Lydia watches, she doesn’t turn back.

* * *

Allison comes home to an empty bed and a missing girlfriend and Lydia staring into the mirror she had bought the week before with Erica in mind, the edges sharp and a little rough and bright red like her favourite lipstick.

“She left,” Lydia says, doesn’t bother to explain who ‘she’ is or why she’s gone, because Allison knows, can feel it in her bones just like Lydia can.

“You okay?” Allison asks, resting her hand on Lydia’s back, and she doesn’t move away. When it’s just the two of them, they let go a little, relax, forget that humans are warm and soft and have blood thudding in their veins, and they don’t.

“Is this what heartbreak feels like?” she asks instead, and Allison falters.

“I wouldn’t know,” she says, and Erica has left but Lydia doesn’t feel quite as lost when she knows that Allison is here, because Allison has always been here, and she knows the humans wax poetic about love almost too often, but she thinks they don’t quite know what they’re talking about. They’ve never held Allison in their arms.

She kisses her silently, asks permission with her body and not her words, offers comfort and safety and love in the only way she can rely on. She doesn’t trust her words, not yet.

* * *

It’s sunny outside and Lydia is halfway through putting on her makeup when the doorbell rings. She ignores the pang that hammers her chest when it sounds, because Erica had changed it to a tinny version of Jingle Bells last Christmas and she’d never changed it back. That’s the problem with humans – they’re everywhere, and once they sink their fingernails in it’s hard to get them to let go. She could do without the reminders that her favourite human is no longer hers.

She hears Allison open the door downstairs, hears her intake of breath, and if she had a heart it would be pounding words instead of blood. _Erica, Erica, Erica._

She’s downstairs before Allison calls for her, takes them one at a time and forces herself to breathe air she doesn’t need. Allison takes her hand, and clutches it hard enough to break a bone, and Lydia squeezes back in warning. It won’t hurt her, but it’s the principle of the thing. She steps closer though, tries to tell her with her body what her mouth can’t say: that she’s here, will always be, no matter how many blonde humans come and go.

She doesn’t try to say how much she really wants there to just be one.

“Well?” she asks, raising an eyebrow and looking at Erica, still standing near the doorway. She doesn’t want to be dramatic and say that it comes down to this, but, well, it comes down to this.

“You’re a goddess, I’m a goddess, we’re all goddesses – it’s just a bit more literal for you two. I’m okay with that,” Erica says with a smirk, but even if Lydia couldn’t read between the lines of her body, she’d be able to tell that Erica’s nervous, waiting.

Lydia would draw it out a bit, make her wait like Erica made her wait for _three weeks_ with no word, surrounded by wine glasses with lipstick on the rim and mirrors of scarlet red, but Allison wrenches her hand from Lydia’s to fling herself into Erica’s arms.

It’s not like Lydia doesn’t enjoy watching the two most beautiful women in the world start making out a foot from her, but Erica’s just come back to them and she feels such an intense need to _know_ , to have Erica say that she’s staying forever, but she stamps down on it. She’s not going to demand something she’s not sure she can ask for.

Allison and Erica break apart, their hands still clinging to each other, and Allison’s smiling so wide, so beautifully, all teeth and pink lips and happiness. Erica looks Lydia in the eye, clearly trying to look unafraid. It doesn’t quite work, but she appreciates the effort; not everyone can mask their emotions as well as she can.

“Kiss me,” she demands, waits impatiently for Erica to close the distance between them and cover her lips with her own. It’s good, just as good as every other kiss they’ve ever had, and Lydia still knows exactly how to make Erica’s knees shake, but it’s different. It’s more fragile and yet more strong, somehow, because they don’t know how exactly they’re going to do this, but they _are_ going to do it, and that decides it, really. Lydia doesn’t have to be a goddess to know that this is a part of reality that nothing will dare to try to shift.

Allison’s hands slip around her waist and fumble blindly for the edge of her shirt, and Erica gasps into her mouth, and she thinks she might know what a heartbeat feels like.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm [ohmccalls](http://ohmccalls.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
